Setting up all students to thrive
In the classroom, if we expect the bell curve, that's what we get. You plant and cultivate a garden of average daisies along with a handful of roses and the unavoidable crop of weeds.
It’s a framework that many teachers and even parents are comfortable with. However, all of the individual human beings in this scenario are potentially suffering.
The Roses (those who are academically successful) risk the derision of less successful classmates. They may experience the pressure to stay on top. They may act out physically or check out mentally as a result of boredom. They may lose their appetite for challenge if the work is consistently within their comfort zone.
The Daisies may be under pressure (internal or parental) to become roses. They may be struggling to stay afloat. They may have potential that's going unrecognized, needing just a little more support and encouragement to excel.
The Weeds may be intensely challenged by the subject matter, which could be the result of a lack of a strong foundation, a learning disability, or both. They may have executive functioning difficulties or challenges at home that impair their ability to follow through with assignments.
While it's tempting to believe that good behavior and good work gets rewarded and it's just the natural state of things for some people to fail and others to succeed, a teacher must never succumb to this belief.
It's a teacher's job to believe in the potential of each of her students to grow, develop, and be an engaged learner. Sorting students based on performance serves only to measure where they are right now, not who they will always be. All students can thrive with the right support.
A friend of my mother’s who worked as a special education teacher in California was assigned to a group of students with track record of poor behavior. Every day, she took them outside to run around the building. This extra exercise worked wonders for the students’ behavior and academic performance. By the end of the year, the administrators believed that they had misclassified these kids in the first place. It didn’t even occur to them that they were seeing a normal year’s worth of growth and learning fostered by an empathic teacher.
I’m not saying that everyone should be treated the same, or even that everyone has the same potential. It is clear that some people need more time and repetition to understand things while some take to things so easily that they appear to be skipping ahead. Rather, what I am suggesting is that we resist the temptation to label and categorize. We always need to make room for someone to surprise us — for that “weed” to turn out to be a rare wildflower we simply didn’t recognize at first. We need to give every single one the opportunity to grow and flourish.
The tender loving care that we put in will pay off, even if the results take awhile to show up. A lovely garden has lots of different colors and textures — and by design, not all of the flowers will bloom at the same time. That’s the beauty of it.